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Letters to the World “Series” by Jascha Kessler

Monday, December 26, 2016

Letters to the Editor

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

New York

Dear Letters Editor:

I am not surprised to read Garry Kasparov’s lamentation and elegy for the loss of a good future in Russia after Gorbachev’s resignation from the failed Soviet regime that almost destroyed Western civilization, such as it is and perhaps never really was after 1917. It reminds me that when I found in 1947 an old, leather-bound coffee-table-sized Don Quixote, wonderfully illustrated by Dorè, I learned to appreciate true Comedy. Subsequently, I encountered the sequel, seldom mentioned, recounting the Don’s further vicissitudes. There Reality as fact was bitterly revealed: the hopeful Don and his loyal, clear-sighted page Sancho Panza are beset by brigands, captured and endure calamity after calamity in the Spain of the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Poor Kasparov, a great chess master now living in exlle from the failed and failing “democracy” of the Federation that superseded Yeltsin and Gorbachev. Should we be surprised? As Ecclesiastes told us millennia ago: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there isnothing new under the sun.

Born in New York City, Jascha Kessler (Ph.D., Litt.D.) has received varied research grants, prizes, and writing fellowships since 1952 when he won a Major Hopwood Award for Poetry (University of Michigan). They include the NEA Fellowship in Writing, two Senior Fulbright Awards to Italy and one to Czechoslovakia. Since 1961, he has been a Professor of English & Modern Literature at UCLA, also teaching poetry, fiction, and playwrighting. In 1979, Mr. Kessler was a Rockefeller Fellow and worked at the Bellagio Study Center, completing his translation (with Amin Banani) of the Persian poet Forugh Farrokhzad: BRIDE OF ACACIAS: THE POETRY OF FORUGH FARROKHZAD (Caravan Books, Delmar, NY: 1983). He won a California Arts Council Fellowship in Fiction Writing for 1993-1994. He reviewed fiction and poetry weekly, theater and events on the air for KUSC-FM (Los Angeles) for 5 years in the 1980s; several dozen of his reviews, both broadcast and published in magazines and papers since the 1960s, have been anthologized in CONTEMPORARY LITERARY CRITICISM (Gale Research) over the decades. His literary essays have appeared widely. He also served as Arts Commissioner for the City of Santa Monica, California, from 1990-1996. In 2001, his translation of TRAVELING LIGHT from the Finnish won the Finnish Literary Translation Centre Award. Kessler has published several collections of fiction. AN EGYPTIAN BONDAGE, & Other Stories (Harper & Row, NY: 1967); DEATH COMES FOR THE BEHAVIORIST: 4 Long Stories (Lexis Press, San Francisco, CA: 1983); CLASSICAL ILLUSIONS: 28 Stories (McPherson & Co.: Kingston, NY, 1985); and TRANSMIGRATIONS: 18 Mythologems (Jazz Press: Capitola, CA: 1985). His latest collection, SIREN SONGS & CLASSICAL ILLUSIONS: 50 Stories", was published by McPherson & Co., in December of 1992. Also a novel, RAPID TRANSIT 1948: An Unsentimental Education (Xlibris 2000) and a second edition of AN EGYPTIAN BONDAGE (Xlibris 2000). He has also published three volumes of poetry: WHATEVER LOVE DECLARES (The Plantin Press: Los Angeles, CA: 1969; AFTER THE ARMIES HAVE PASSED (NYU Press: NY: 1970); and, IN MEMORY OF THE FUTURE (Kayak Press, Santa Cruz, CA: 1976). Also, revised as COLLECTED POEMS (Xlibris 2000). In 2013 his KING SOLOMON’S SEAL: 76 AND MORE FABLES, was published (xLibris.com, in hardback, paperback, ebook versions).